Radwa Ashour - Blue Lorries

Three months after I started at university, Hamdiya, startled, observed that I was securing the waistband of my trousers with a rope. I explained, ‘I seem to have lost a lot of weight. I tried Papa’s belt, but found that it was too big.’

‘Take off the trousers and put on a dress.’

I didn’t answer. I didn’t have a clean dress. I pulled my shirt-tail out of my trousers and let it hang down so as to cover my waist and the rope tied around it.

‘Okay?’

‘Okay,’ said Hamdiya. Then, ‘Wait a moment.’

She brought a measuring tape and put it round my waist. ‘Leave your trousers with me — I’ll take them in for you.’ By the evening of the following day, I found the three pairs of trousers I’d given her on a hanger suspended from my bedroom door. They’d been washed and pressed. I tried one of them on, and it fitted just right.

The episode of the trousers was nicer than that of Shazli’s appearance on the scene.

An amazing paradox: Hamdiya didn’t enter my room that day (nor had she ever done so before, of course, since for her it had been a restricted area from the time she moved in). She left the trousers hanging on the doorknob; the door was closed. But that tentative step she took marked a turning point between two phases. Afterwards the door would be opened to her and she would enter quietly, by degrees. I didn’t take note of exactly when I first said ‘Come in’, but I did say it.

Shazli, on the other hand, arrived with an uproar and departed with an even bigger one, leaving behind him a state of chaos, despair, confusion, and a period of years dedicated to my attempt to reassemble the fragments of my life and put it back in order.

Yes, there were two paradoxes; or you might say it was one that consisted, as is usual with a paradox, of two parts.

Shazli came on the scene just the way Hamdiya had, unexpected and unwelcome.

‘Is it true you’re the daughter of Dr Abdel Qadir Selim?’

‘I’d love to meet your father!’

‘I want to ask him his opinion on the dissolution of the party, and what his position is on two of his colleagues’ having agreed to serve in the ministry, and…’

‘Your mother is French, isn’t she?’

‘I heard she knows Aragon, and that she introduced your father to him. I read the interview your father conducted with him in the early 1950s.’

‘Could I have a talk with your mother about her memories of Aragon?’

I surprised myself with my answer.

‘She wouldn’t agree. She’s writing her memoir, and it’s certain she’ll include in it the story of her acquaintance with Aragon.’

His brashness annoyed me — it seemed to me there was more than a little arrogance in his self-assertion. I concocted the notion of a memoir in order to put an end to the discussion.

What can have happened after that, to make me warm up to him and befriend him? A few days later he told me he cared for me, and that maybe I didn’t reciprocate the feeling because he was of peasant stock, or because he was dark-skinned with coarse hair — maybe also because his name was Shazli. I laughed at that fourth reason he cited; the remainder of the list was as provocative as the first part: ‘And of course you’re half French, with smooth hair, the daughter of well-known people, and your name is Nada!’ I didn’t laugh at his reference to my name; his words felt hurtful. Was he blackmailing me?

At any rate, Shazli succeeded. It was as if he had in some way held out his hand to me, and after I rejected it I became confused, wondering whether he saw in me things I didn’t see in myself.

We started seeing each other.

When at last I invited him to come visit us, my father commented on him unfavourably: ‘The boy looks like a fish — what do you see in him?’

‘He’s courageous, shrewd, perceptive, and easygoing, and he understands the common cause.’

‘ “Shrewd” — do you know the meaning of the word? Look it up in the dictionary!’

‘I’ll do no such thing! You don’t know him. He’s my good friend and I know him well!’

I repeated angrily to my father what Shazli had said to me when we were first getting acquainted — repeated it exactly: ‘You snub him because he comes from peasant stock, he’s dark-skinned, and his name is…’ And so forth.

‘Right,’ my father replied sardonically, ‘like I’m the Prince of Wales.’

My friendship with Shazli grew stronger during the sit-in. We stuck together in the hall, with thousands of other students, for seven whole days. We discussed economic, political, and social conditions. We criticised authority and its trappings, along with repression, America, and Israel. We raised our hand to vote for or against, or to call, ‘Point of order.’ We agreed and disagreed, we helped with the drafting of statements, shared in discourse and sandwiches, in anger, anxiety, and the glory of our affiliation with a student body with a high committee of its own choosing, whose communiqués bore the legend, ‘Democracy all for the people, and self-sacrifice all for the nation’. We sent a delegation to the People’s Assembly and the unions, and received a delegation from them; we got telegrams of affirmation and support, and we requested that the President of the Republic come and answer our questions.

I would spend the whole day in the hall, but as a concession to my father’s insistent wishes I left the university at nine or ten o’clock in the evening. Shazli would escort me to the door, saying to me repeatedly, ‘Your father is a reactionary, Nada. I don’t see how he can forbid you to spend the night at the sit-in, and I don’t see why you obey him!’ Then we would bid each other good night. He would go back to the hall, while I turned toward the house. In this way, all week long, the discussions were repeated, until all of the participants in the sit-in were arrested at dawn, and my father sent me to my mother for fear that otherwise I would be arrested, too.

Was it a mistake to acquiesce in my father’s decision? He couldn’t stuff me into a suitcase, but he packed me off to France against my own wishes. He made the decision, but I accepted it. My self-doubt would trouble me for years. ‘Fifteen hundred of your comrades are in prison — what are you doing here?’ This question kept me awake nights, resounding in my brain until it became fixed there like information memorised in childhood. Feelings of guilt were etched deep in my consciousness, to be reinforced later by Shazli’s words, half in jest, half serious: ‘You went larking off to Paris for rest and relaxation, leaving the rest of us in our cells!’ Contrary to my nature, I was tongue-tied, and shifty-eyed like a guilty child. I didn’t recount to Shazli the details of the three weeks I spent with my mother in Paris. I only said, ‘I learned to cook.’ He raised his eyebrows in surprise, then burst out laughing.

There was no relaxation or peace of mind, despite my mother’s solicitude and her wish to put me at ease. I had no access whatsoever to news of my comrades. It was not the era of satellite and the Internet. There was virtually no word about the students who’d been detained, no news. When I rang my father, he avoided any discussion of the topic, presumably out of a concern for security. Why did I go along with his decision?

In the morning, my mother would go to work, and I would take up a book. I would switch on the television, put a cassette in the tape-player. I would go out and stand on the balcony, return to my book, then leave it again to pace around the house. Back to the balcony. I would look at the clock, then look at it again. I didn’t know anyone in the entire city. Gérard was studying at some university far away from Paris. I didn’t know how to contact the girls and boys to whom he had introduced me; I couldn’t even remember their names. The sky was always cloudy, and usually it rained. I would go down to the street, then go back up to the flat after five minutes. I waited. I waited until I heard the key turn in the lock, and then I would leap up to greet my mother with a hug, and after that we would fix dinner together, and sit down to eat it and talk. I would draw out the conversation, putting off going to bed, dreading the desolation that lay in wait for me the following morning.